Dr. Moreland is currently a professor of philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. He is the author of twelve books and over thirty articles that have been published in well-known international academic journals. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from USC. He has planted three churches and spoken and debated on over 175 college campuses.
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Sometimes one wonders whether the Church is crushing its thinkers, or, rather, if its thinkers are holding up the Church itself. Such is the imagery embodied by Biola University's Calvary Chapel, which rests directly on top of the offices of some of the Church's most clear-headed, far-sighted, and provocative thinkers. Among the number downstairs is Dr. J. P. Moreland, professor of philosophy at Talbot School Theology.
"What are you still doing here? I told you to report to the lake of fire!" exclaims Jesus, addressing a motley group of scholarly looking fellows carrying "Jesus Seminar" briefcases. "We took a vote and decided you really didn't say that," they reply. So goes the Johnny Hart strip, one among many comic strips gathered below Moreland's doorplate.
Often gathered outside his office, his students are queued to query him. Stepping inside his office and looking to the right, one finds Moreland's theological library (his philosophy collection is kept in his home office). On the left is his desk--a fairly simple and standard set-up, adorned with twenty-some pictures of his two daughters, Ashley and Allison, and his wife, Hope. Two Rembrandt prints hang on the wall: The Return of the Prodigal, and The Descent from the Cross. A sword rests just above his degrees. Its blade is engraved with the words, "IN BATTLE WE WILL BE VICTORIOUS!" A friend recently gave the sword to him for his fiftieth birthday.
One of Moreland's essential properties--put in metaphysical terms--is his affinity for Disneyland. "JP" would not be "JP" if he had no enchantment for the "happiest place on earth." An annual pass in his wallet waits for the next break. On his desk is a Mickey mug. His Macintosh screen-saver parades an ever-changing group of characters--Goofy, Daffy, Mickey, Minnie and others. On his tongue are recommendations for the best rides and the best study-spots. (While tourists bring movie-cameras to Disney, Moreland brings metaphysics texts.)
Whether at Disney or at his desk, Moreland brings both lightheartedness and keensightedness to his life and work. With his feet propped-up on his desk, his chair leaned back, and his hands folded behind his head, he often beckons the student to "have a seat!" And so began the following conversation.
..
Communiqué:
Dr. Moreland, thanks for providing Communiqué an opportunity to glance into your life and thought. Three years ago, I had the privilege of talking with you, and I asked what some of the greatest influences have been upon your spiritual development. You mentioned two things, reading Dallas Willard's book, The Spirit of the Disciplines, and reading the atheists. I don't know if you remember that conversation--
Moreland:
--I do remember it.
Communiqué:
Is this still true?
Moreland:
Yes, it is true. When I became a Christian in 1968, I realized that if Christianity were really true, then it was what I'd been looking for all my life, and if it weren't true, then it was just nothing but a self delusion at the end of the day. I realized that for my faith to grow, it needed to be able to withstand serious questioning. And so I thought that eventually what I needed to do was to read what our critics were saying to see if they really had substance. As I began to face honestly alternative worldviews, I became increasingly convinced that the Christian religion was actually true, and that Jesus Christ could in fact be trusted with everything in my life-from helping me raise my children, to providing my finances, to being with me forever. On the other side, on a more positive note, I take spirituality to involve seeking to live all of my life in partnership with Jesus Christ, according to the resources of the kingdom of God and the power of the Holy Spirit. And that, then, means learning how to live in that kingdom, and learning to think and to feel and to behave as Jesus would if He were I in every area of my life, and to draw on the resources of the kingdom and of the Spirit. Now, that means that the spiritual life is really a supernatural activity, and I should be seeing the activity of God in my life and through my prayers in such a way that my life cannot be explained simply by my own talents and my gifts and abilities. There should be more to it than that. Dallas Willard's writings have been very instrumental to me, especially his new book The Divine Conspiracy, in aiding me in growing in that supernatural type of spirituality.
Communiqué:
What are some instances in which things couldn't be explained simply by your talents and abilities?
Moreland:
We have been seeking to build an MA program here at Talbot that would honor Christ in the intellectual world. We looked at the other programs of this sort around the country, and it is risky to start something like this. We had hoped for at most 40 to 50 graduate students-which was a faith vision for us. We now have 90 to 100 graduate students. I had a couple interested in our program hand me an envelope after I preached at their church one Sunday morning with twenty-five thousand dollars in it. We had been asking the Lord to bring some more resources our way, and we get a gift of twenty-five thousand dollars out of the blue. That is an example of something that is very hard to explain normally. In my own personal life I've seen things-answers to prayer that have taken place"that are hard to explain away. My children have been involved in these, they have seen God provide things for them, like a pool table that was given to us in response to prayer. So these are things I have seen happen.
Communiqué:
What is an average day--or better, a week--like for you spiritually speaking? What are some disciplines that you engage in or enjoy?
Moreland:
I don't think an average day is a good question, I think an average week would be better, because my days are different and I don't have the same routine every day. But over the course of the week I would engage in a good amount of prayer. Prayer is a discipline and a spiritual activity that is very central to my overall Christian life. That would involve for example, certain routines while driving in the car. My week requires me to do extensive driving, from thirty minutes to longer, seven times a week. I get in the car and repeat the Jesus prayer a handful of times--which is "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me"-- maybe ten or fifteen times. That centers my heart on Christ, and I pray through the Lord's Prayer or the 23rd Psalm. Then I begin to ask the Lord for certain things regarding people I love or things I'm depending upon. And I always take the opportunity to thank Him for the things He has given me for which I'm grateful. I engage myself in reading of scripture. I'm reading now through Harmony of the Gospels; I will do that a couple of times a week. Also, I meet every Friday morning with a friend. I've been doing this now for eight years. We meet probably 40 times out of a 52-week year. Right now, we're reading through St. John of the Cross. We read the great spiritual classics, talk about them, and commit to praying for one another. I have times of solitude and aloneness sometimes when I jog, and I use those as times to be quiet and pray.
Communiqué:
What are some of the greatest challenges you have faced in your personal life?
Moreland:
Well, one of the greatest challenges I faced was being single until I was 29 years old. I had told the Lord that if He wanted me to be single, I was willing to do that if He would make Himself real to me. It was not what I wanted, but I was willing and I had enough confidence in Christ to know that He would not abuse that. Many of my friends began to get married, and I had to struggle with feelings of being left out, but I was able to work through that, to mature in that trust, and eventually God provided a wife for me and I was married at 29. But learning to work through that was a challenge. Probably another challenge has been raising teenage girls, which is a difficult task. And, probably third has been trying to balance my ministry, because, as you've often heard, the good is the enemy of the best. There are so many things one could do; the question is how to know what you should say no to. And that's not easy--that's an on-going process.
Communiqué:
To many people, both Christians and non-Christians, the very word "philosophy" tends to conjure up images of aloof, white-bearded, ivory-tower speculations light years removed from the practical concerns of people today. At best, philosophy is extra-curricular, at worst it's antithetical to the faith. Why is there such a suspicion and cynicism toward intellectual pursuits, and to what extent is it justified?
Moreland:
C.S. Lewis once said that good philosophy must exist if for no other reason than that bad philosophy needs to be answered. I think that philosophy in recent years has earned the reputation that you've mentioned. I think that from the early 1900s up to about fifteen years ago, philosophy tended to be controlled by very secular, very liberal, very cynical, frequently arrogant people who often were not very socially gifted or interested in other people. If you go back, though, and look at the history of philosophy, this is an aberration--it hasn't always been that way. Most pastors in the history of the church were philosophically trained. Most of the great theologians were philosophers as well--Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, and so on. Even Calvin and Luther, however much they might have criticized certain philosophers, were themselves very, very gifted in philosophy. So philosophy is a hunger for wisdom, and it is a desire to want to pursue goodness and truth and beauty and reason as best as one can, and it does not need to produce people who are like those you described. What we are trying to do is provide an alternative model of what it is like to be a philosopher.
Communiqué:
What advantages do Christians have when it comes to intellectual pursuits such as philosophy?
Moreland:
Well, we have a source of information about topics from Holy Scripture that gives us a strong and solid set of truths about things. Now I'm not suggesting that the teachings of Scripture are always crystal clear--many times what we need is exegetical and philosophical clarity to understand what the Bible says about a subject. But still, the Bible gives us, as academics, information that non-Christians don't access. For example, the Bible teaches that human beings will survive death when their bodies are in the grave. That tells me automatically that if I am a person, then I am not my body or my brain. God is a person, yet He doesn't have a body or a brain. So, when I approach philosophy, I already have information that I am not a physical object, so that guides me in studying, say, the philosophy of mind. Similarly, I know, from Scripture, that knowledge is possible, that there is such a thing as truth, and that there are objective values. I also know this from things outside of Holy Scripture, but the point is that my theological insights from Scripture give the Christian a tremendous advantage in not having to start from ground zero in constructing a world view. I might also say that Christ is alive, after all, and one of the things that He has promised to do is to be our co-worker. So I can ask Jesus Christ to help me write papers, to help me with my research, to give thoughts to my mind as I labor on things, to guide my thinking. One can learn to produce books and articles and papers for classes that are the joint products of my efforts and of Christ Himself as we work together. So there is a partnership with the living Christ in my work if I learn to work with Him in that area.
Communiqué:
What unique contribution and perspective can and ought a Christian bring to the areas of film, music, art, literature, et cetera?
Moreland:
Well, I would suggest at least two things (there may be more). First, beauty is objective and knowable and real. Now, certainly non-Christians can make that same claim--Plato did, for example. But Christians have a very special stake in starting with the idea that there is real beauty: it's not in the eye of the beholder, it's objective, it can be known.
The second thing that I think can be very distinctive is the role of beauty in the overall life that is well lived and in the overall culture that is a good culture. I'm thinking now about two things. First of all, the experience of beauty is very close to the religious experience of God. What that means is that by learning to appreciate art and beauty, one can cultivate a soul that is more sensitive to the voice of God and spirituality, because there is such a tight parallel between aesthetic and religious experience. Secondly, the Christian can point out that finite beauty never satisfies, and that finite beauty as wonderful and intrinsically valuable as it is, functions not only as a good but also as a pointer to a good that lies beyond it that is our ultimate telos. And that is the ultimate beauty--God Himself.
Communiqué:
How can local churches facilitate and encourage that type of involvement or engagement?
Moreland:
Well, if you go back and look at people like Bach, for example, there was a long period of time when it was the local church that fostered the development of classical music and that sort of thing. I think that the church can encourage and sponsor and try to strengthen artistic work as a means of enhancing worship, as a means of appreciating God's world, but also as a vehicle for conveying a Christian message, because art can be used as a vehicle for communication. The problem is that the art community tends to be on the borders of culture right now, and unfortunately, many in the art community tend to line up with the secularized far-left view of the world. So, what often happens is that the church pours the baby out with the bath water. It reacts to the fact that so many leading artists tend to belittle sanctity of life and marriage and that sort of thing, and the conclusion that's often drawn is that we need to distance ourselves from art. But that's the wrong conclusion. I think what the church needs to do is to try to find a place where artists feel free to do their work as long as they'll interact with pastors and theologians about the nature of it.
Communiqué:
I know that much of your work is directed against philosophical naturalism. Say a little about the nature of naturalism as it functions in the university and in our culture.
Moreland:
Philosophical naturalism is basically the idea that the only thing that we can know is what we can know through the methods of science. If you can't know something through the methods of science, then you can't know it. The kind of picture that science gives us of the world is the picture of what is real, namely, that the physical universe of entities in space and time is all there is and ever will be. Now this worldview occupies a dominant place of cultural authority. The worldview of naturalism, I would say, controls probably 70 percent of the academic community. The hard sciences get the government funding, and the scientist has now become the priest of secular culture, who is able to speak ex cathedra about almost any topic. What this has done is led inexorably to a diminished view of the human person, a physicalist view of the human person. And it has led to moral and religious pluralism and relativism, because ethics and religion are not the sorts of things that first and foremost can be proved or tested scientifically. And, if knowledge is scientific knowledge, and if there is no scientific knowledge of religion and ethics, then it follows that there is no such thing as religious and ethical knowledge. Given that, many people draw the conclusion that the purpose of religion and ethics is to be a relativized set of beliefs whose sole value is their utility. So I think naturalism has had that function, and my job is to try to critique that.
Communiqué:
To what extent has the church capitulated to naturalism?
Moreland:
I think that's a hard thing to answer. I would suggest that we look in two areas to find the answer. The first area would be the diminished role of the pastor as an authority figure for a body of knowledge. A pastor in a community used to be looked at as very much like a cultural authority over a field of knowledge--theology. Now, the pastor, if he has any authority at all, has authority which comes from his moral life. We might look to pastors as the most trustworthy people in the community, their marriages are more likely not to be divorced, that sort of thing. They are not viewed as people who can speak with authority about a body of knowledge, like a lawyer can speak with authority about law, or a psychologist about psychology, or a chemist about chemistry. So the first way the church has tended to capitulate is that we no longer view the pastor as an authority in a field of knowledge, but rather as maybe a moral guide or something of that sort. The second area the church has capitulated is among its intellectuals. There are a number of Christian intellectuals who have accepted theistic evolution and who believe that religion and science shouldn't be mixed at all, and that anyone who attempts to explore scientific data in light of creationist understandings of the world, and to seek evidence for God's existence from the created order are misunderstanding science and religion. Many of these same intellectuals have accepted physicalist views of the human person, where the human person is basically a properly functioning brain and there really is no soul or mind. And so I think in these ways, many Christian thinkers have capitulated to the dominance of science, and they have tried to find ways in where theology can be complimentary to science but not critiquing science.
Communiqué:
Dr. Moreland, those who have the privilege of knowing you know that you are a man of high energy and intense authentic joy. How do you maintain that level of intensity, given the rigors of your work? What is your first line of defense against discouragement and doubt?
Moreland:
I would say that I have three lines of defense. The first line of defense has been a history of facing questions honestly. After you do that enough times, you begin to realize: been there, seen that, done that. I don't think I'm going to come up with some knock down drag-out argument that's going to show, for example, that the soul isn't real, or that the physical world is all there is, or that the universe didn't begin, or that the resurrection didn't happen. So now, when new books come out heralding these kinds of things, I've been there before. So, the first lesson to be learned is that you reap the benefits of a life that for several years has been willing to look at these things without hiding from them. You reach a point after a while, to where while you still remain open to looking at new issues, you've just done this so many times that there's a settledness. A second line of defense is to have a very intimate set of friends that are in the kingdom, with whom you can open up about every facet of your life and who are lifelong friends, and you work hard at cultivating those friends. Those friends must share the same values and the same vision of Christianity. I'm not talking about agape love. I'm talking about phileo. We in the Christian church have disparaged phileo in favor of agape. Agape is an unconditional love, and that's wonderful, but phileo is a very special love for friends, and it is conditioned on certain things. It is conditioned on a mutual commitment to a set of values and a certain conception of the good life. Friendship is critical. A third line of defense for me has been physical exercise. I work out every week, and I keep my physical exercise up, and I will tell you that has gone a long way in giving me energy.
Communiqué:
What final advice do you have for our audience?
Moreland:
I wrote a book over a year ago called Love Your God With All Your Mind (NavPress, 1997). The main thesis of that book is twofold. The first thesis is that because Christ is who the New Testament says He is, He is literally worthy of telling me what I should do with everything in my life. He is worthy of being my Lord, and I can trust Him. The second theme of that book is that Jesus Christ is intelligent, and He wants me to be as intelligent as I can possibly be. That means that I should sanctify my intellect in His service, and do the best I can to develop a robust mind in service of the spiritual life. I would urge Christians to continue to work hard at developing their minds and loving God with all of it.